


The Hostage

by agdhani



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 03:02:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3512783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agdhani/pseuds/agdhani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why does he stay?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hostage

The dark day of his capture, Athelstan believed it would be his last, that God would call him home as He had done with so many of his Lindsfarne brothers when the fearsome Northmen had overrun the monastery in their search for treasure. But God had other plans for this particular monk, banishing him instead across the cold sea to a land both warm and cold. Led by the rope about his neck, expecting to endure great physical pain, he’d stopped following the man who had spared his life, brought him here, and bowed his head, awaiting death.  
Instead his binding had been cut and he had been bid to leave if he dared.

Athelstan had stayed.

There had been torture, but not the torture of the body he had expected. It had been the torture of servitude, the torture of watching this infuriating, handsome brute with his wife, his children, his people…and knowing he was watched in return. It had been the exquisite torture of learning ways that challenged his faith, challenged everything he had ever known about northmen, family, and life. It had been the torture of feeling his old self gradually stripped away until the man exposed was someone Athelstan barely recognized.

He was a hostage still, though now a free man. A hostage of learning, a hostage of the gods who warred within him, a hostage of his heart. For just as on that first day he had set foot in Kattegat, he could have left if he chose. And yet he stayed, bound to Ragnar Lothbok as surely as if by chains of metal around his extremities or a collar about his neck. What it was about that man that had kept him here, Athelstan could not say, but he could imagine being nowhere else.


End file.
